Please Forget Me - Chapter 325

‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃 ࣪ ִֶָ☾.

You won’t think of me anymore, will you? You’ll be too busy learning how to live with an unfamiliar past to spare me a thought.

I’m the only one who can’t let go of you, turning you over and over in my mind.

No matter how I look at it, it was the worst possible farewell.

In truth, once I knew Rupert was alive, there couldn’t have been a better way to part. I should have realized that sooner. If I had accepted earlier that my role ended at ‘saving you and sending you home’, would you have suffered less?

All those hardships you endured, perhaps they were the result of my excessive greed.

We’ll pay for our sins when we die, so while we live, let’s just love. That was the arrogant resolve I made.

In the end, we were punished while still alive. Perhaps all our suffering was the price of my sins.

Because I strayed onto the wrong path, hardship never ceased. Each time God gave me a chance to turn back through suffering, I chose the path that stained my hands with the most blood.

What truly frightened me was how I was supposed to go on living with these blood-soaked hands. Even that worry was unbearably arrogant.

After committing such sins, to still wish to live, no. I should pay for them in hell.

“W-where… are you going?”

“Home.”

I’m sorry

“I should go home too. What I needed to do is finished.”

I lied to you to the very end.

If I had said I was going to die, I was afraid your soft heart might stop me.

Now I’m bound for hell anyway, and my brother is no longer alive, there’s no reason left not to kill myself. I don’t even want to be reborn.

Once, as I kept vigil at the bedside of a soldier dying in agony, he said something like this: it hurt so badly, and there was no hope of survival, that he considered putting a gun in his mouth and ending it quickly—but stopped. Because that would be suicide.

They say suicide sends you to hell. He asked me if that meant he couldn’t be reborn as a human. How would I know? Still, it was my duty to answer in God’s place. God wouldn’t grant a sinner’s wish, so I told him he wouldn’t be reborn.

That soldier lingered on for a long time, then died painfully, enduring the slow decay of his body solely for the chance to be reborn. I don’t know if that reward was worth such suffering.

I don’t want to be reborn. Every moment of being alive was pain.

There were moments when I was glad to be alive—when you loved me. But once you denied that love, all of those moments became deceptions.

So in the end, you didn’t love me, you loved the idea of a husband.

That was what I’d always wondered. What was I even hoping for?

The saddest part isn’t that you didn’t love me. It’s that that false love somehow became the strength that kept me alive.

When you rejected me at first, it stirred a stubborn resolve to live my life. So why do I want to die now? Because I’ve lost the strength to live.

Still, at least I won’t be dying with a sense of injustice anymore.

To be honest, I can’t say I never felt wronged before. That’s why I once mocked you as a disappointing woman who loved a man like Rupert. Like the fox calling the grapes sour because he couldn’t taste them.

But this time was different. Without Rupert’s interference, we lived as an ordinary couple and exchanged love.

I was given a fair chance. I tried my best and failed.

So I have no regrets.

I feel light.

There’s no one left to worry about whether my feet hurt as we walk, or whether I’m hungry. No one to ask me endless questions about the unfamiliar world outside the train window. No one to lean their head on my shoulder and fall asleep. And so—

Well… to be honest, that doesn’t feel light at all. It feels empty.

You won’t feel that way, will you?

I truly hope you don’t.

Now that you’re gone, I should break the habit of thinking as if I’m talking to you… but this life will end soon anyway, so even that thought is meaningless.

“Next stop: Greenhaven!”

Looking back on everything, I feel sorry for Ted too. I wonder if he left knowing I was still alive.

I plan to say goodbye to Ted before I go. If I’m bound for hell, I’ll never see my brother in heaven again. That’s why I boarded this train.

My brother is probably buried in the family graveyard not far from our hometown. It’s the countryside, hardly anyone gets off the train. As I stepped onto the quiet platform, I thought I hoped no one would recognize me on the way to the cemetery. That wish seems to have been my undoing.

“Killian Ackroyd, you are under arrest for desertion and treason.”

Rupert Mansfield. The enemy who took everything I ever wanted from me. From the first fish I caught to my first love. In the end, it seems he intends to steal even my death.

* * *

The man who is my husband left me behind at the Loveridge estate in Dunley.

“I’m busy with work, so I’ll take my leave.”

Work? Wasn’t his work with the military police about coming to reclaim me?

In any case, he said that since I had never lived at the Marquisate in Stamford or Dunley, I had no belongings there. Then, because he was busy, he didn’t have the time to help me adjust to life at the Marquis’s residence.